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: [ Useless Dicta ]

I'm a Mac

I've been a Mac user for about 5 years now. The reason I switched is because I was absolutely fed up with Windows and all of the XP vulnerabilities, viruses, crashes, etc. My friends have been known to call me an Apple whore because I have multiple iPods, an iphone, a laptop and various other apple accessories that are far overpriced but oh so fabulous.

One of the "privileges" of becoming a DA is that you get your very own office laptop. I had to bite my tongue to stop from laughing when the IT guy came by my desk to set me up. He pulled out this gigantic brick, it's an IBM thinkpad circa 2003. Only has a 50GB hard drive and 512mb of ram and it weighs about 10 pounds. But that's government work for yah. It may not be a glamourous piece of equipment, but at least it gets the job done and has VPN software so I can log into the work servers from home, which is great for helping me avoid having to trek into the office on the weekend.

I tried out the working remotely thing from home this weekend for the first time. I fired up the good old brick, plugged the wireless card in (yes folks- it doesn't even have an internal wifi card) and ran the VPN client. Within about 7 minutes I was all hooked into the work network plugging away on prepping motions hearings for tomorrow morning. About 30 minutes later I started getting all these weird pop ups. The first one said something about spyware being detected. The next few said my system was vulnerable. And then finally a strange, but rather legitimate looking "advanced virus remover" program looking screen opened up. I ignored the first few popups, didn't click on anything and kept going about my work. But by the time the virus remover program came up I was concerned. So I started google searching on the trusty Apple only to find out that the work PC did in fact have a virus, a nasty trojan at that. I literally could have screamed. The only thing I did was connect the work computer to the same wifi network my personal apple is hooked up to. I've never had any virus problems with my apple on this network. And yet, somehow I must have gotten a virus on the work computer when I opened up the browser to navigate into Westlaw for some case law research. ARGH!

I spent a good 2-3 hours trying to remove the virus with no luck. So tomorrow I have to go beg and plead with IT to fix the problem. Granted, I have a simple solution to the problem that doesn't involve having IT spend hours fixing it, but I don't really think the IT guy will be amused if I show up to work tomorrow with my Apple, tell him I need it configured to access the work network and then explain that the IBM thinkpad was sent to its rightful final resting place at the bottom of the dumpster.

Just in case there was ever any question as to if I'd ever switch back to PC land, today's events sealed the deal: I'm a Mac, so deal with it :-)

Full post as published by [ Useless Dicta ] on November 16, 2009 (boomark / email).